Echoes Between Us - McGarry, Katie Page 0,71

no thing. Knox makes eye contact with me again, and it appears like he’s heading in my direction, but takes his sweet time as he stops by every damn person to make small talk. Right when I feel like my bones are about to pop out of my skin if I don’t leave, Knox finally slow-strides his way up to me. “You came back.”

“Yeah.”

“You ready to talk?”

I scan the room, wondering if someone is watching, if someone is judging, if someone knows my truth. Wondering if they know Mom and they’ll tell her where I’ve been and then the rest of the world will know all my secret weaknesses.

“Brother,” Knox says. “There’s nobody here who’s going to judge you. We leave that nonsense to everyone outside this room.”

I shove my hands into my pockets. “You still live at home?”

“Not much longer. My parents asked me to move in last spring to help with bills. It sounded good at the time. I’m in college, working a full-time job, and things were and still are tight for me on my own. But then I moved in and remembered why I had to move out to begin with. Living with my parents is like playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun. Maybe someday they’ll change, but that someday isn’t now.”

I’m playing with that gun every time I jump, and the guilt that walked me through that door tonight is a boulder in my stomach. “I put someone in a dangerous situation so I could feel high, and I can’t do that again.”

Knox sizes me up. “Anyone get hurt?”

“I scared her.” Because that’s how normal people would react.

Veronica’s fall was a freak of nature, my jumping after her was a gut reaction the moment I heard her scream, but being on the ledge with her was where the lie began. We possibly could have climbed the rock wall. The ground was unstable, but the risks between going up and going down were equal. I should have made it her choice, but I wanted to jump and I wanted to jump with someone in my arms who couldn’t swim because it heightened the danger.

But I’m haunted now, in ways I’ve never been before. The pure look of fear on Veronica’s face when we surfaced after the jump was a damn kick in the balls that won’t stop hurting. She was scared, is probably traumatized, and that’s my fault. “She’s physically okay, but I’m a bastard for putting her in the spot that I did. It could have gone wrong in a lot of different ways. If I had messed up even a fraction, she could have died.”

“First step in all this is to admit you have a problem,” Knox says.

“Yeah.” That much I read on the website. A small voice screams inside me that jumping isn’t as big of a deal, but then I think of Veronica shaking in my arms, her pale face, her wide eyes. I can’t do that again. Not to her. Not ever. “I don’t drink. I have these urges for an adrenaline rush. I find dangerous cliffs and jump into water, and it’s getting tough to stop. You still think this place is for me now?”

Knox is quiet, and I prepare for him to turn me away. “Truth? Until I can find you that specific support meeting, which I’m not sure exists, you’re stuck with me.”

“You sure?”

“Do you want to jump off a cliff right now?”

I nod.

“Then yeah, you’re stuck with me. Want to go get some food?”

Not at all. I really want to get in my car, peel out of the parking lot, find a jump and feel the sweet rush of flying through the air and then the slight pain of hitting the water. But I also don’t want to do any of that because as much as the rush will feel good at the time, the guilt of being so weak that I couldn’t stop myself will eat me in the morning. “Yeah.”

“All right, brother, let’s go eat.”

He starts for the door and when he notices I don’t follow, he glances over his shoulder. “You all right?”

“Why are you doing this?” I ask. “Why are you taking me on?”

“Simple answer—because someone took me on and saved my life. Complicated answer—there are a ton of things wrong with what you just told me, but there’s one that bothers me the most. You’re more concerned that your friend was in danger than you are that what you do